2001-12-29

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2001-12-31

I saw the Lord of the Ring movie today. It's great! Fantastic locale. There's a few surprising events happened, and the movie packed a lot of book materials there. The incidentals were there, if not whole, at least in pieces. As always, there's omission from the book, but that's expected. You can't really condense a very thick book into 2 hour movie or 3. A mini-series, maybe, but even 3 hour movie is pressing it. I'm withholding judgement on appropriateness since I haven't read the book yet.

This makes it twice this year that I enjoyed seeing the movie translated from book. The first one was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Again, there's omission from the book. It's interesting that Harry Potter's criticism was centered around the fact that the movie follows the book too closely, and the LOTR movie deviates from the book too much. This shows that there's just no pleasing people when it comes to making movie out of a book.

My personal opinion is that you should deviate from the book somewhat. It's a different medium and to copy the book too closely is misappropriating the medium. Then again, taking too liberal point of view on the story detract it from the essence that made the original story so great. In essence, the story becomes "Hollywoodized".

I personally enjoy books better, not only in terms of richer storyline, but also that I'm a fast reader. I'm free to skip chapters and read only the interesting parts of it. The chapter selection of DVD movies somewhat mimics it, but not to the same great degree of a book. Then again, sometimes a bad writer is incapable of creating tension and drama that a good movie can provide. So, although I like book in general, I like movies sometimes, too.